place during the eclipse. 1 March 1504 On 30 June 1503, Christopher Columbus beached his two last caravels and was stranded in Jamaica. The indigenous people of the island welcomed Columbus and his crew and fed them, but Columbus' sailors cheated and stole from the natives. After six months, the natives halted the food supply. Columbus had on board an almanac authored by Regiomontanus of astronomical tables covering the years 1475–1506; upon consulting the book, he noticed the date and the time of an upcoming lunar eclipse. He was able to use this information to his advantage. He requested a meeting for that day with the Cacique, and told him that his god was angry with the local people's treatment of Columbus and his men. Columbus said his god would provide a clear sign of his displeasure by making the rising full moon appear "inflamed with wrath". The lunar eclipse and the red Moon appeared on schedule, and the indigenous people were impressed and frightened. The son of Columbus, Ferdinand, wrote that the people: Columbus timed the eclipse with his hourglass, and shortly before the totality ended after 48 minutes, he told the frightened indigenous people that they were going to be forgiven. When the Moon started to reappear from the shadow of the Earth, he told them that his god had pardoned them. Fictionalized variations In 1885 H. Rider Haggard used an altered version of the real story of the rescue of Columbus in his novel, King Solomon's Mines. In that novel, Allan Quatermain and his fellow Englishmen use their foreknowledge of a solar eclipse to claim that they will black out the Sun as proof of their powers, and save captive girls from an unjust death sentence. In 1889 Mark Twain used a similar plot device in his novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. In that novel, Hank Morgan, a 19th-century resident of Hartford, Connecticut, after a blow to the head, awakens to find himself inexplicably transported back in time to early medieval England at the time of the legendary King Arthur. When Morgan is about to be burned at the stake, he pretends to conjure a solar eclipse that he knew was about to happen; this prediction saves Morgan's life. Another novel that used a solar-eclipse scene modeled after Columbus' lunar eclipse was Bolesław Prus' historical 1895 novel, Pharaoh. A similar plot also features in